The time of the wedding and the ceremony that makes family

3.2. The time of the wedding and the ceremony that makes family

A wedding does not begin and end on the day of the celebration. Composed of a group of movements, events and memories, the “time of the wedding”, as I have sought to define it, is constituted as a specific temporality, when the daily status of relations is suspended and they are managed in the name of a project to organize the large party. It is initiated by the couple’s commitment to celebrate their union, but for the event to happen, the engagement of a much larger collectivity must be generated and administered.

Prepared with diligence, effort and financial and emotional “sacrifices” from many people, a large wedding can produce nuances in the relations involved. Differences and proximities are highlighted in the interactions and under the tensions from the decision-making processes, the hosts are defined and relations gain new impulses of caring. This is the expectation of creation of a moment in which many other relations, in addition to that between the bride and groom will be produced, commemorated and publicized.

Under a temporal focus exercised by the interlocutors themselves – which can begin, for example, from a verbal request for marriage, the acquisition of the couple’s first property, or the discovery of a pregnancy while dating – the time of a wedding can be composed of a sequence of highly controlled, formalized and protocoled occurrences. The events range from a bridal shower, the choice of the bridal gown and the bachelor’s party and go beyond the moment of the religious ceremony itself. But it is also defined as a temporality in which even the non-formal or protocol interactions fall under an order of

extraordinariness. 22 This character of a break from daily life is certainly one of the important elements that can characterize the time of the wedding from a ritual perspective. But it is not the only one. The frequent use of the word “ritual” by the brides and grooms to designate the “non-routine and specific phenomenon” (Peirano 2002:

17) through which they are passing, is often evoked to emphasize the sensation that the wedding constitutes

a mark of a change of status, whether of the relations or of the people. 23

Looking from a performatic perspective (Tambiah 1985), the rituals present at the time of the wedding have a symbolic effectiveness and generate a sphere of moral sharing of conduct. At the same time, the propriety of its ritual symbols (Turner 2005), is not only capable of providing a path of intelligibility to the codes that organize the relations but can also produce effects on the actors in this structure – as highlighted by Cristina Marins (2017) when analyzing desert tables and revealing the definitions of hierarchies in this type of occasion. When Luis sold his motorcycle, the symbol of his “crazy life” in the periphery of São Paulo, he triggered elements capable of reconfiguring his position in the relations. In name of one form of masculinity that sought to become another, based on valuing the “family” and rejecting the controversial version of the “bandit” (Marques 2009; Feltran 2014), he triggered his value within a ritual structure, as a groom to be, and thus also produced his value as a person.

22 Such as for example the relations with distant relatives and friends who, during the preparations for the weddings, always appear to be under constant tension and evaluation. Demands for affection are placed in other terms and any mistrust, discomfort or conflict can result in the cancelation of an invitation to the party and the risk of a later break in the relationship.

23 Breno de Oliveira Alencar (2014) has specifically addressed the theme of engagement and dialoged with Van Gennep (2011) by considering each moment of definition of the future couple as a “rite of passage”, which repositions the couple in their family relations and attributes a new status to their identities. Although he ponders the historic changes in this process, even indicating how much the marriage was no longer a mandatory route for reaching a status of an “adult” person, and indicates that there are considerable differences in the male and female experiences around engagement, the author highlights how much this ritual is important to his interlocutors as a definition of a temporal mark in personal trajectories.

But if we can look at the preparations and the celebration of a wedding as a ritual, which breaks with daily life and reveals a moral structure and repositioning of people and relations, its precise dynamic, as a celebration, also reveals other analytical potentials.

Examining studies about festive dynamics among different Amerindian populations, Beatriz Perrone- Moisés (2015) inspires thinking of the party as a type of relational matrix that, in articulation with its antagonistic partner, war, reveals the different domains of relations. Returning to the analysis of the potlatch, “probably the best-known Amerindian party” (Perrone-Moisés 2015:10), she insists that the event can go beyond the closed analytical profiles in disciplinary subthemes – such as politics, economics and religion – and defends that the exchange of banquettes and kindness of the Kwakiutl produces the group itself and its relations.

The festival that allowed Marcel Mauss (2003) to consolidate his theory about exchange, if on one hand could be addressed as a moment of destruction of goods, distribution of property or of squander, on the other, reveals the imbricated correlation between prestige and generosity. To give a good party is

a condition on which rests the political authority of a chief or the religious authority of a shaman. It is where wars are suspended, enemies transformed into friends and where the very limits of composition of a collectivity are defined. A celebration establishes collectivities by its capacity for mobilization, and therefore, to give a good party is recognized as a prestigious task. Among hosts and guests, the “code of hospitality” in throwing a good party is always a valuable and engaging social project.

None of my research interlocutors sought simplicity in their wedding events. Nevertheless, none of them had spectacular parties simply to present their guests to an ostentation of their wealth. Whether for the middle class bride, who worked for three years to save the amount needed for her wedding, or for the couples from the periphery, who married with just a few months of preparation, to have a party is always a costly project for those who undertake it.

Comparatively, the material indicates that while the organization of weddings in the middle class is usually prolonged in time, until the engaged couple have the economic conditions to offer a party to their guests, in São Mateus, even with parties for hundreds of people, the organization of the events requires much less time given that it was the guests who collectively gave the parties to the bride and groom.

In the periphery of São Paulo, José Guilherme Magnani (2003) produced his study in contrast to many of his contemporaries in social sciences by indicating how much in the life of “workers” (Magnani 2003: 140) is also dedicated to the time of the party. And here, the kilometers or hours of travel from Goiânia to São Paulo with manioc flour among the baggage, the nights without sleep looking for the best prices for produce and flowers, and the days cooking for their 450 guests are part of the dynamic directly translated into the maxim that “having a party is a lot of work”. For those who are not from a “rich family”, organizing a party requires “working day and night” as Juliana indicated.

Revealed by the “work” the generosity of the partners who dedicate themselves to preparing the party attributes new highlights to the relations and gives others impulses to emotions. A groomsman becomes “practically family” after giving a home appliance as a present, a relationship of hostility can be suspended by the help of a friend and the tie with an uncle is made closer after he raises a “scandal” by defending the bride who was picking up her dress. “Help” was a form of guaranteeing his place as a member of the group of hosts, by inserting himself in a collective within the ritual hierarchy and securing his place as a part of and not only a witness to, the commemoration. The wedding thus appears as an extraordinary space-time marker in which relatedness (Carsten 2000) had the opportunity to be created and affirmed: it was a family party that also made the family.

At the same time in which the parties in São Mateus had the potential to produce many relations, the amount of help received by the bride and groom was also interpreted as proportional to the strength of the ties that had accumulated. From the circulation of money, objects, and gifts, the organization of the weddings revealed how much economic exchanges and emotional dynamics cannot be seen as antagonistic domains (Zelizer 2009; Trindade 2015) and that goods were easily transformed into gifts, capable of materializing the social relations (Mauss 2003; Pinho 2017).

“With the wedding, we saw how much we were loved” Juliana said, indicating the effects of her wedding and a logic of attribution of prestige based on a capacity for collective mobilization from which not even God escaped. The religious figure, was, in São Mateus, repeatedly brought to the narratives to emphasize the moral value contained in the practice of collectivization. And while the declarations emphasized difficulties encountered during the organization of the wedding celebrations, they also reveal that the limits were not individually overcome: at a minimum, God helped.

At the time of the wedding, no one organizes a party alone. And in a correlation to language used in relation to the work of social movements in the same region (Aquino 2015), the result of this collective effort could only be expressed in terms of “conquest” in light of “life struggles”. Get married – and in a wedding with hundreds of guests – signified a triumph for the bride and groom as well as for all the people directly engaged in the production of the party as its host group. It was another form of obtaining “victory in the war”.